a colo(u)rful mind

As a follow up to my previous post on the hype of Twitter, I’m going to discuss the various ways (but by no means an exhaustive list) of using Twitter that I’ve discovered over my experimentation with the tool in the past couple of weeks.

Using Twitter for Personal Broadcasting

This was how I used the service for the first few months subscribed to Twitter.  Broadcasting sporadic updates to the handful of 20 or so friends that were following me.  Furthermore, over half of the followers I had barely and still to this day, not more than 10 updates in the past 6 months.  Twitter used as a service like this, offers not much more extra than what the Facebook status update feature does (or even less when one considers most people have an already established community on Facebook).  The only difference I saw was that if one’s updates were public, they would be accessible by the general public to read. Now why would one want their updates public?  (A question that I will come to answer later in this post). Though I did not protect my updates, any messages I did not deem as public were sent as direct messages to friends.  Nothing that IM or Facebook couldn’t handle; and so continued my ignorance on the dynamics of Twitter.

Using Twitter as an Alternative to SMS

One of the early uses I discovered was using Twitter (TwitterFon as the iPhone specific app) as a free SMS alternative service on my iPhone 3G.  It was free to use the data connection as served by my 3G service to send tweets (great for a cheapskate like me!).  Unfortunately this was limited by the fact that not many of my friends check their Twitterstream often let alone use the service.  One applicable instance though was when I had left my power supply for my Macbook at home and an ex-colleague saw my tweet and managed to snag one for me at his work place so I could borrow it!

Using Twitter for News Feeds & Aggregation

I get most of my news from the internet.  In fact make that all my news (sad but true but then isn’t that how the Internet is changing the real world?).  Due to my broad interest in a variety of subjects, visiting all the sites can be costly and an ineffective way to circumnavigate the large amount of information.  For a while I used RSS feed aggregators like Google Reader and Netvibes.  However the desire to read most of the articles quickly became overwhelming and one’s capacity to filter through the feeds quickly is largely determined by their own descretion.  With Twitter (or in my case TweetDeck), though it is not designed as a feed aggregator, it has proved effective in helping me navigate the sites I’m interested by subscribing to certain authors, sites or people whose interests are similar to mine and having them filter news to their followers that would be of interest to me.

Using Twitter as a Social Network

My initial method of befriending followers consisted of adding familiar names of the @replies in my Twitterstream and any that I knew from friends’ following and followers lists.  However, as my update activity grew I soon had strangers following my updates and learned that my mental approach towards Twitter had been the single barrier to my understanding of it’s potential.  Twitter isn’t simply a personal communication tool to broadcast updates to your friends but a Social Network.  Earlier in my post, I posed the question ‘Why would one want their updates public?’.  The answer lies in how one wants to use Twitter.  It is an exceptional tool to find and network with new people that have similar interests and the key is the publication of those updates in the general Twitterstream.  Tweets that can be searched by the various apps that have cropped up as the popularity of Twitter has increased.  For example, a search for say ‘Barack Obama’ would return recent tweets involving the new US President.  Exploring the twitterstream of such a subject would enable a user to befriend other Twitterers that enjoy discussing politics!

Using Twitter for Company PR, Branding & Marketing

In the previous section I discussed how one could search the public twitterstream for a certain subject.  Imagine the data one could find on one’s company, their service/product and the opinions amongst the gossip of the twitterstream.  It goes without saying that Twitter is a powerful social media tool with which to communicate with the community but with greater viral effect and immediacy.  Already a numerous companies have recognized the value of Twitter as a customer/community service tool to control their brand and image.  With the rapidly viral qualities, it has in many cases proved to be the quickest and cheapest way to get news or marketing content out to the crowd.  (Note that disseminating advertising especially for the purposes of monetizing one’s personal twitterstream is in my opinion and in most cases considered spamming and is not advocated.  It is also a sure fire way to get unfollowed.  Check my Twitterquette link below for more information!)

Conclusion

Twitter in concept is not dissimilar at all to the comments one makes on a friend’s status or posts on Facebook or the various blogs they surf.  In fact, with such a wealth of data to be found in people’s comments and opinions on one’s status, blogs or tweets, tools such as Twitter search can help bring value to such data.  One of which, is the ability to create meaningful relationships that are relevant.  Incidentally, last fall I was at a tech meet up and met one of the co-founders of Backtype. They’ve built a service that allows one to find and follow blog comments of specific individuals and/or posts.  A great idea and in many ways, a social network for comments and it’s commentators.  Another service that I recently signed up to is FriendFeed, winners of best new startup of 2008 at the Crunchies.  My initial impressions are that it’s a feed aggregator that collects data from multiple sources from social networks, social bookmarks to blogs and RSS feeds, amongst others.  It sounds very promising but warrants a fuller post pending further investigation.

The question these days with most startups is how will services such as Twitter and FriendFeed (sub: social content discovery network) be monetized so that they are self-sustaining (make that profitable)?

Which also begs the question, if Facebook offered users the option to publicize their status updates allowing them to be searchable by all Facebook users, would that deprecate Twitter?

My initial thought is not likely but a discussion on both questions will come in a later post.  I’m sure I’ve overworn the attention of most readers so far despite my vain attempt to write a short and digestable post.

By no means an expert in this subject, I’m hoping my insight and observations from my recent experimentation with Twitter are a helpful introduction to those that are new to it.  For further reading I suggest TwiTip and familiarizing oneself with Twitterquette.  Feel free to add any relevant sites in the comments area.